Microsoft's Ballmer Calls Out Google Over China Stance

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, in a speech to oil company executives in Houston on Thursday, criticized Google for its threats to leave China after cyberattacks allegedly launched by Chinese hackers.

"People are always trying to break into other people's data," said Ballmer. "There's always somebody trying to break into Microsoft."

Ballmer suggested that Google's decision to no longer filter out internet searches objectionable to the Chinese government was an irrational business decision. After all, Ballmer said, the U.S. imports oil from Saudi Arabia despite the censorship that goes on in that country.

"The U.S. is the most extreme when it comes to free speech," said Ballmer, noting however that even the U.S. bans child pornography, while France bans internet access to Nazi imagery.

Ballmer said Microsoft would comply with China's censorship requests, just as it follows the laws of every country where it does business.

"If the Chinese government gives us proper legal notice, we'll take that piece of information out of the Bing search engine," said Ballmer, adding that outside China people will know what searches Microsoft is blocking on Beijing's behalf.

Ballmer's comments were during the Q&A session of a keynote speech he gave to a Microsoft-sponsored energy industry conference. He lauded oil and gas exploration companies for pushing advances in computing that give them the "ability to model the real world in the virtual world." To process seismic data gathered from oil and gas fields, oilfield service companies like Schlumberger employ server farms with as many as 30,000 servers working in parallel.

Ballmer talked up Microsoft's partnership with Halliburton's Landmark Graphics division to devise software enabling three-dimensional visualization of oil and gas reservoirs. The software system is navigated by geoscientists using the game controllers for Microsoft's Xbox system. "I kept telling people our investments in the gaming business are relevant to industry," Ballmer said.